


come again spring

by Aasyla



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-08
Updated: 2018-11-20
Packaged: 2019-02-11 23:54:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12946776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aasyla/pseuds/Aasyla
Summary: The winter after Vecna's fall is a short one, but it takes them all longer to thaw.A series of non-sequential oneshots that are set during or post-series.





	1. Hallelujah to your weather veins

**Author's Note:**

> Set concurrent with episode 44 (before shit hits the fan)
> 
> Do you ever think about how good of a foil Pike is to the rest of Vox Machina and cry a lot?
> 
> Chapter Title from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO2QUcIT9-0

_"And the conclusion that I’ve been coming to so far, and Pike being the exception to this rule, as she’s the exception to so many things, is I think we’re very broken people."_

 

* * *

 

 

She can see the fondness in Percy's eyes when he says this, far though she was when he did. Percy did always mean well — for those closest to him, that much was true. It hadn't taken her long to connect his ruthlessness to his affection, even if the connection was less than obvious to its wielder. But he reserved for those he called his friends a heart learning how to love again, fumbling through the hurt. 

And yet Pike had to wonder if Percy had ever considered why her hair matched his.

Too much of the day is left once the refugees have been settled. Cassandra de Rolo is effective above all else, wearing the mantle of duty on such narrow shoulders, and with the help of a city eager to rebuild, Emon's survivors find their shelter and try to make the word peace out of quiet. Some of them, Pike thinks, must not have ever gone beyond their city. Their homes. Unaccustomed to life on the road, or the way your body aches the morning after you slept encased in your armour.

Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last time, Pike misses her friends.

There is enough of Percy in Cassandra to not be entirely lonely, though, and Pike sees glimpses of the girl Whitestone forgot in its need for a ruler. She worries the hilt of a rapier with the same gloved hand that caught a snowflake during the midday snow, and whether out of compassion for the cleric or her own need for company, Cassandra is quick to invite Pike to stay at Whitestone Castle until anyone can think of a better plan.

The castle seems a fitting place for Percy to grow up, and Cassandra even takes her around for a tour late one afternoon. The gaps of silence in the tour are louder than their voices, though, and Pike waits patiently for Cassandra to finish staring into each of the bedrooms they come across, still littered from mess from what Pike can only assume was Briarwood use. She can only guess which ghosts haunt her guide more.

They head next to the younger Percy's study, and Pike can almost picture him there, free of stubble and starkness but still all limbs and lenses, folded impossibly in an armchair surrounded by a pile of books, which now sat coated with dust on the shelf. Taking a moment to scan the books, she spots an elementary introduction to the sciences with a broken spine at her height, and wondered at what age Percival learned to take better care of his tomes.

And a short time later, after Pike shares a cup of tea with his sister and she retires to her duties, Pike lets her mind wanter to what else of Percy's previous life he'd had to unlearn.

A tremble in the marksman's hands, unused to the weight of a gun: of a death he designed in his hands. A near-sighted gunslinger, whose eyes had developed reading books by candlelight until long after his siblings took on the silence of sleep.

Percy would be an irony if he wasn't a tragedy.

It's this same near-sightedness Wilhand had warned her of, when young and eager, she'd first started asking about her great-grandfather's goddess.

'The sun isn't burdenless, high in the sky though it rises. It ascends to heights where everyone can see and benefit from its light, but though they look to it, no one can see the sun for how bright it burns.'

Though it may comfort Percy to think so, Pike is no exception to their group. A life bifurcated was something they all could share, with Pike's other path written across the length of her torso.

Brokenness is the breastplate she dons every morning. Sarenrae's crest buoys the burden, but it was her armour long before she followed her goddess.


	2. and what of the stories we leave behind (we will carry them in our hearts long after we become the earth)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This isn't exactly post-Vecna but I really didn't feel like making an entirely new work just to include this tiny piece, so have some peak soft Percahlia to make up for my disorganization

Once, on their year’s reprieve, Vex’ahlia had joined him in his armchair, fully disrupting his reading like a cat would disregard his work. He was only happy to let her interrupt (and always would be, for what more could he invent but someone’s happiness?).

“Do you think we could have a life here, Percival?”

“I don’t see why not. Why, do you want something more?”

“No.” she’d been quick to quiet his fear, the ever-growing shadow of ‘she’s woken up from this nightmare and is wanting more, something less broken, less haunted,’ as much as she ever could. “I mean after all of this. With Vox Machina... it’s going to end some day, it has to. And when that happens...”

“We won’t, Vex’ahlia. Vox Machina is more than the same group of people in the same place, you know that.” And gently, with the same arms and hands that took more lives than Percival could spend his sanity to count, he held her, burying his face by her neck to breathe her in, and hear her light hum.

“I have no intention of letting you go anytime soon.”

“And I...” her hand falters as it finds his chest, deliberately laying it over his heart (that had been hers for so long, he carried his love for her as his pulse) “I will not hurt you, Percival.”

“Even if I want you to?” He catches her hand before her eyebrow can raise in a question, pressing on with severity that left teasing of their bedroom activities behind.

“Loving you hurts. It hurts when you’re not here, when I worry about you, when you’re sad; but that’s what makes it so important, Vex. If it didn’t, there would be no point.”

“Well, not deliberately then. Unless you ask nicely for it,” she added, shifting the gravity of his words to something that felt like less of a eulogy.

“You have bewitched me, dear. Body and soul. You know that, right?”

“Quoting one of your great love stories again?” She teases, wrapping a hand in his hair.

“One day, they’ll quote ours.”

—

In the early days, when drawing out schematics for arrows next to Pepperboxes and Manners gloves, he’d written, next to them, ideas for what one day would be her title. (A younger man, but one no more in love than he was, would’ve doodled hearts around her name, perhaps)

It had begun the day after she’d turned to him, fussing with armour, with hair, every inch of herself in scrutiny and asked him, “Do I look like I come from money?” They both knew, then, what she was asking. ‘Am I worth anything? Can people see I’m worth something?’

 _You are_ , he’d wanted to say, wanted to rub away every inch of doubt to show her the gold in her skin, so bright the sun of Pelor could only come close. _You are, and you do, and if it takes me until the end of my days, I’ll die telling the world of your worth, so strong it could make a broken man something beautiful by your light._


End file.
